


tell me we'll never get used to it

by ftmsteverogers



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: AU, Eventual Happy Ending, M/M, Nobody's dead forever, Reincarnation, attack of the second person, mlm author
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-03
Updated: 2014-12-03
Packaged: 2018-02-27 07:01:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2683646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftmsteverogers/pseuds/ftmsteverogers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You would die with him a hundred times and a hundred times again if it meant that you would find him in every life you will live from now to the end of eternity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tell me we'll never get used to it

**Author's Note:**

> This is a reincarnation story, so it deals with character death themes. Everyone ends up alive in the end.

* * *

 

Autumn

_the revolutionary war: 1765_

 

* * *

 

 

It’s unclear when it starts.  It’s bloody teeth, a feral smile, two strong hands lifting you up off the pavement—you don’t remember how it starts, but you remember how it ends, you always remember how it ends. You think it might be your curse, that you remember the glint of his teeth in the dying light, that you remember the way his thumbs hook around his suspenders, but you remember nothing so well as you remember the way it ends: it ends with a fall, it ends with your outstretched hand, it ends with a thousand promises you make that  _this time I’ll catch him, please god this time let me catch him._

Here are dangerous words: you always find him in the war. It is never the same war, never the same war twice, but you have come to realize that the distinction between them is not nearly as defined as you have been led to believe. You always find him in the war, and you have seen the same blood fall from his half-parted lips over and over again, dripping down onto the uniform that is never quite buttoned right—you have seen him bear the flag of a dozen different nations, but he has never once managed to wear a collar that isn't crooked.

It's unclear when it starts. For all you know, you have been chasing him since the beginning of time—him, with his dark hair and eyes the color of lighting, his mouth has curved for as long as you can remember into a lopsided smile that has always seemed to you just barely edging on hunger. You always find him in the war, and you always wear his blood in streaks down your arms, and when you bare your teeth like an animal, you are always surprised to find that your sweat and his blood taste the same when they drip into your mouth. You are made of the same stuff, you and him. You wonder sometimes if that isn't why you keep finding him—his insides call to yours, sometimes across the world, sometimes across the two inches between your bodies as you lie in the same bunker, your ankle hooked over his ankle, his rifle digging into your side. 

Say the words, say them carefully to yourself: you always find him in the war. Taste these words on your tongue the way you have tasted his blood. Memorize them. Chant them by rote in your sleep. You will need them in the lying lull of peace-time, when all you have is your reflection, and no matter how hard you stare at your face, you have never had the capacity to turn it into his. Look into the mirror. Meet your own reluctant gaze. Say the words, say them again, say them over and over until you believe you will see him time and time again until the world has worked itself to death.

 

* * *

 

There are few things that are constant from one life to the next, you have noticed, but the things that are constant cannot be swayed.  These are his lips, curved into an exasperatedly affectionate smile.  These are his fingers, curled around the barrel of a gun.  This is his pained voice, cracking on the last syllable of your name as he clutches at his shoulder, blood seeping between his fingers, this is the twisted chain of his dog tags, the outline standing through his shirt, your name and his, resting directly over his heart.  This is the sound of him choking on his own blood. 

It never gets any easier, watching him die.  You’d think it might have lost its sting, after watching his last breath leave his body more times than you can count on both hands, but it never gets any easier, and it always tastes the same on your tongue when you scream out his name, gunmetal pressed against the backs of your teeth, bile rising up in your throat.  ( _Bury him under my name_ , you think, desperately, his left hand crushed between your own.  _Bury him where I can find him easily afterward, because I die when he does, it’s my body that won’t quit, it’s my body that keeps breathing, but I’m dead, I swear, I am dead—_ )

 

* * *

 

James Barnes is an English name, and he carries it well enough, with his high cheekbones and thick, dark hair.  But you do not meet him as an Englishman, you meet him as the cocksure Son of Liberty with the glittering eyes that make something strange and warm spark in the pit of your stomach.  He has read every inflammatory paper you have ever written about the disgrace that is taxation without representation, he listens to you rant and rave about the revolution while he sits across the table from you, interjecting only rarely with questions and excerpts of poetry that make the sparks in your belly ignite into a brush fire.  It is longing, you think, it must be longing, and his easy grin doesn’t make the feeling any better—it does, in fact, make it worse.  The other Sons of Liberty have learned by now to leave you both mostly to yourselves when you start down this road, your heads bent together, trading hushed, fervent words back and forth with your hands clutched around your sheaf of papers.

Sometimes he slings an arm around your neck—both of you in shirtsleeves from the fierce Philadelphia heat—and proclaims you a genius to the rest of the room.  Every other conversation will stop, every eye held expectantly on James as he holds one of your papers in his hands and reads what you have written aloud; he reads with a fanatical kind of devotion, eyes lit from within with a fire that can’t help but overwhelm you, and when he is finished, his hand with your page is held aloft like a pale banner of surrender.  The room will erupt into applause, and James’ manic grin, lit with the same fire that is in his eyes, does not dim as the other Sons of Liberty ruffle your hair and overlap each other’s voices in a chorus of _there, Steven, do you not see what you’re made of, you are a poet, Steven, you will birth a country through your metaphor alone—_

 

* * *

 

In some of the lives you share, he loves you.  Sometimes he takes your face between his gun-calloused hands and kisses you, hard, always defiant, always as though he is daring you to push him away.  (You have never once pushed him away.)  Sometimes he does not love you, or, at least, sometimes he does not act on it, and you have never once mustered up enough courage to make the first move.  So the both of you sit in whatever bunker you have dug, his eyes burning into the space between your collar bones, and you do not touch him until he has given you explicit permission to do so—he will take your hand and guide it beneath his shirt or he will not, he will kiss you or he will not, he will love you or he will not, and it is not up to you which it is.  You will love him in every life you will live no matter his decision, because he is all you have.  You do not know how to live without him.  (You have never had to learn.)

There are some lives in which the both of you fight side by side.  These are the lives you like best, because there is very little you are good at, and killing people—shooting the gun that he has taught you how to aim, wearing the tattered flag on your shield, using your fists when you have to, knuckles split and bloody—this is all you are good for, in the end.  You have never been good at holding your breath, never been good at holding yourself still, but you are good at bleeding, and although he will never stop screaming at you for spitting up blood, you know that you must do this one thing that you are capable of doing.  You are not afraid of causing yourself harm. 

In these lives, the ones in which you fight together, these lives are the ones that let you find him the fastest.  The war consumes you both, but it consumes you _together,_ and though it is inevitable that you will watch him die in these lives, you are comforted by the fact that you will not be long to follow.  You never die first, but you are never too long to follow him over the edge, and that—that is very nearly good enough.

 

* * *

 

The Sons of Liberty, with their rage and almost religious adulation, give you an outlet to your fury.  You are taught how to make violence out of your words, you are sworn into secrecy and stay up until the only light is your flickering oil lamp while you write curses and blessings and declarations of intent in the dead of night.  James, who cannot draw your political cartoons and whose writing is, as he puts it, nothing that would make men lay down their lives—James, whose eyes are unnaturally bright with the revolution that bleeds from the inside out, James, who understands the bite of bullets better than you ever could—he attends every late-night meeting, pours over the same five maps of your infant country in the making over and over again, takes each breath as if it will carry him straight to the front lines of the battle that has not quite yet started.  Does he yearn for it?  Does his heart cry out for the bloodshed yet to come? You do not know, and this is what frightens you.

He has taken to coming home with you after the meetings, watching you talk with his hands stuffed in his pockets, eyes trained on the curve of your cheekbone, the hollow of your throat.  You talk with your hands as much as your mouth, painting the world in front of you with your palms, smearing color in swathes in front of you with your fingertips.

“Would you like to come inside?” you ask him, hovering in front of your door.  He has yet to see the inside of your home, and his gaze is curious as he glances at the door behind you.  “I could—tea.”

“Tea that we’re meant to be boycotting?” James asks you, lips twitching.

You roll your eyes, turning away from him long enough that you can unlock the door, though you can still feel his eyes on you, you can still feel the weight of his gaze in the dips between your vertebrae.

“Will you come inside, or won’t you?” you ask, looking over your shoulder, and perhaps you aren’t asking the question you had meant to, because there is a dark warmth in his eyes that you had not meant to put there, blooming like gunpowder behind his clear, blue eyes.

“I will,” he says, taking his hands out of his pockets, and, in the months to come, you are surprised and gratified to discover that he does not need much convincing to stay.

 

* * *

 

If you met him before the revolution—this revolution, the first revolution—you do not remember it.  The days spent with him in your small, cramped bed, his face tucked between your shoulder blades, are melded together in your head—you remember his hands, resting on your shoulders as you sit at your desk, reading over your writing with his chin resting on the crown of your head.  You remember his body curled around your body, one arm draped over your stomach, wrapped around you like a second skin.  But these flashes of memory, his warm breath against your neck, his strong legs wrapped around your narrow waist, they are as ephemeral as a fever dream and just as difficult to grasp.  The other lives are clearer in your head, snapshots that you do not have to concentrate hard to pull to the forefront of your mind, but this one—this revolution, this first revolution—it pulls at the marrow of your bones to focus on, makes your wrists cramp and a headache split down the nape of your neck.

You are lucky, at the heart of it.  You have had more opportunities to love this man than you should have had, more opportunities than you think you frankly deserve.  You have chased him from century to century, life to life, and though it hurts, and though it burns you from the inside out, you would not give it up for any other alternative.  There is very little point of living, when he is not there, but you do not think you would have the courage to die if you did not know that he was there waiting for you—it is easy to succumb, when you know that when you next open your eyes, there will be a new James Buchanan Barnes for you to find somewhere, and the both of you will be drawn together by the inexorable force that does not let you rest, does not let you sleep without remembering that there is a Bucky for you to find and hold and perhaps give your life to.  It would be easy, putting your life in his hands and letting him squeeze.  You have done it before.  You will most likely do it again.

There are some worlds in which he is the one to pull the trigger.  You try not to think about these lives, because you know that you ought not to let it happen, but you know with equal certainty that you will; you should not roll over like some armored beast with a soft belly and wait for the final blow with infinite patience, but you do, every time, you do.  Your patience is, after all, far from infinite, and there must be something wrong with you that you would prefer for him to end your life than for you to live out your days in separation from his body, but you follow him like a shadow, you follow him like a curse, and though he haunts your thoughts, you are the one who haunts his footsteps.  _Forgive me_ , you think, though you do not know what you are asking to be forgiven for.  _Forgive me, oh, god, Bucky, please forgive me._

 

* * *

 

Such is the curse of the writer that you are always covered in ink, smudges up to your elbows, and James licks the pad of his thumb before swiping at a stain on your forehead.  He cleans you.  He is always cleaning you, and you always become dirtier before his eyes, but he never stops cleaning you.

“How is the revolution?” he asks you, eyes crinkling at the corners, and you don’t care that you are smearing streaks of blue and black on his shirt, because his body is a declaration of defiance, and you would drag your inky skin over his own a thousand times if it meant that you could swallow some of that defiance down your throat.

“It’s turning in circles,” you answer, fist curling tighter around the collar of his shirt, and pull him close enough to kiss.

By the time the Sons of Liberty throw the tea into the harbor and declare war on England, the war has already taken root in James’ heart the way disease has taken root in your lungs, expelled from his body with every exhalation the way that you sometimes cough and cough as if you will never stop.  (It is a miracle, James tells you, your pale, sickly face framed between his two broad palms.  It is a miracle that you have lived this long.  Privately, you disagree—you know who it is that stays up until the early hours of the morning, holding your body against his body, pressing a cool cloth to your forehead with worry creasing his brow, and it is most certainly not God.)

But the point, if there is a point, is simple: the war is in his guts, the war has wound its way around his intestines, it has made a home between the chambers and ventricles of his heart.

“I will fight,” he tells you, naked except for the shirt that is falling off his shoulders.  He is lying back on your bed, watching you dress, leaning back on his elbows as you do up the buttons of your shirt, slowly, ever so slowly.

“I know,” you say quietly.  You fumble a button.

“Will you?” he asks, and it should not have been so loaded a question, but it is, it is weighed down with the heaviness of every hissed argument you have ever had, him snapping _you will break_ , and you snapping back _I am not so brittle._   You know, in your heart of hearts, that he only says these things because it would pain him to watch you hurt, but you do not know how to tell him that you are already hurting, that every day spent safe in your home is a day _wasted_ , that you cannot watch him go off to fight and die if you are not going to stand at his side.  You know very well that there is no place for you in the entirety of the world if there is not a place for you at his side.

It strikes you that he, perhaps, did not understand what you meant when you let him into your bedroom that first time.  Perhaps there are men out there who do not mean _I will watch you live or I will watch you die, but by God I will not take my eyes off you_.  It is possible that he does not know that you mean this, but you do not have the words to explain the feeling that bubbles up and pools under your tongue. 

“I will fight,” you say, with finality, and you cough, once, into your fist. 

James’ shoulders are stiff, but he hands you your trousers when you ask for them, with resignation in the twist of his mouth, legs pale in the flickering light from the oil lamp on your desk.

 

* * *

 

The irony, James tells you, is that sometimes you can’t tell when you’ve landed a shot because the British officers are already decked out entirely in red.

“Makes ‘em easy targets,” he adds, doing up the buckles of his boots with steady hands.  You decide that you don’t like the grin he shoots you then—but no, it isn’t the smile, it is the fact that this beautiful, manic, terrible man is crackling with energy from head to toe at the prospect of fighting this war of your own creation.  You know, somewhere in the back of your head, that he will not like it nearly so much when he is standing on the front lines, mud up to his ankles.  You do not know how you know this.  Perhaps you aren’t the optimist he takes you for.

“Your collar’s crooked,” is all you say, and he lets you straighten it for him, though you both know that it will fall to the side the moment you let it go.  Disarray is written into his genetic makeup.

“Keep writing,” he says.  His large hands close over your small ones, keeping them close to his warm, warm throat.  You think about the blood just beneath his skin, and how easy it would be to unzip his neck, how very, very easy it would be for him to bleed out in your arms.

“Keep running,” you tell him, pulling him up by his lapels so you can kiss that awful smile off his face.

 

* * *

 

There are some lives—some awful, useless lives—in which you do not find him at all.  It isn’t for lack of searching (God knows that you search for him with a single-mindedness that has been, not inaccurately, called obsession), but your paths, on occasion, do not intersect.  These lives where you run parallel to him are not only the worst because you know he is out there, somewhere, dying alone, but because they stretch on _so long_ : there is no respite of death for you when you have not found him, no way for you to find peace until you have searched every foot of land for an imprint of his heel.  You dig up maps, you chase leads, you ask every person you meet if they have seen a man with lightning eyes and a bad left arm, if they have seen a man with dark hair and a mouth that has praised you in four different languages and called you a variety of names that sound to you the way music sounds—

But no one sees him, no one can point you toward him, and you are left with an empty heart and an empty string of decades to live out listlessly.  You are doing time, in these lives.  You cannot feel the tug behind your navel in a way that does not make you feel ill; it is not a compass rose in your stomach, it is only the sick lurch that tells you that you haven’t got your sea legs yet, that you are off balance when you are missing him like a phantom limb.  Like any other phantom, he does not stop haunting you out of compassion.  He is a constant ache, deep between your ribs, between your fingers, itching between muscle and bone like it has crawled beneath your skin to die.

You prefer to live the lives in which you fight alongside him.  It is better to live out your days when he is within touching distance, and although you know you ought to prefer the lives in which you live past your thirtieth year, you vastly prefer to die young with his name in your mouth, the taste of his tongue on your tongue, than to die old after living an entire life without seeing his face.

You would die with him a hundred times and a hundred times again if it meant that you would find him in every life you will live from now to the end of eternity.

 

* * *

 

The British officers have the advantage of military training and combat techniques, but they are, as James told you, ridiculously easy targets with their blood-red coats and blocky formations.  Although you and James and the rest of the revolutionaries are ill-outfitted and outgunned, you have the advantage of the land singing beneath your feet and the righteous fury of a scorned nation on your side.

You think, for a couple frightened weeks, that there might be a chance you could win this war and get out with your life still intact—as intact as any life could possibly be after living through the oil-slick uncertainty that pools in your stomach and the sparks that threaten to set your entire body ablaze—but there is a limit to how lucky a person can be.  Success after success, kill after kill, you watch James fire his rifle with his jaw clenched so tight that you think his teeth might crack if he isn’t careful, and the officers dressed in red crumple and fall, less like dead leaves and more like a waterfall.  There is so much blood.  There is so much more blood than you know how to stomach.

James has better aim, better accuracy, but you are not nearly as bad as you expected to be.  Whether this is something for which you ought to be proud or not, it isn’t clear; the only thing you know is that you can kill these men if you try, and so you do try, and you kill them with an apology rising up in your throat like bile.  It was easy, writing about death and war and fighting when they were concepts with which you were not personally familiar.  Now, on the battlefield, with James at your back, tucked away in whatever tree-shadowed corner offers the best cover, you still pull the trigger—but it is not easy, it is never easy, you should never have thought it was easy.  You shield yourself behind crumbling stone walls, you shield yourself behind his larger frame, and you keep watch over his unprotected back.  (Back to back, spine to spine, elbows knocking together—he needs you, like this, and you did not know you wanted so desperately to be needed until his life was in your hands.)

It must say something ugly about you that you don’t see it coming when James is hit.  You have been dreading the inevitable since the first time you spoke across the table from him, you have been imagining the spray of blood and James’ pale, still face every time you have closed your eyes for more than a moment, but you don’t see it coming when he sighs out a breath, kicking his heels against the wall he’s sitting on.

“Think they’re ever gonna show?” he asks, unimpressed.  You shrug.  You’ve been given bad information before, and you and James have found yourselves in unexpected silence more times than is particularly comfortable.  Further down the wall, you see your friends and your brothers by revolution slumped into sitting with their muskets and rifles lying listlessly over their knees, all waiting, all silent and waiting for the battle to start.  It is electric, the feeling of anticipation that hums between every one of your bodies.  It is almost as though you can feel every one of their bodies as well as you can feel your own—you are every soldier resting their head against the wall behind them, you are every screaming heart, you are every pair of lungs. 

Perhaps it is because your focus is spread so thin that you don’t see it coming until you hear the crack like a thunderbolt, like snapping bone, and James makes an awful sucking, gasping sound, body thrown forward—he tips off the wall, spine curling in on himself, and there is just one moment of silence before the world around you explodes into the sound of gunfire and awful, guttural cries.

 _I deserve this_ , you think, nauseated, when he is clutching at you, his fingers smearing blood down your throat and down your collar bones.  The sound that the bullet made when it hit his flesh will stay with you forever, as will the sickening way that he crumples, the dirt and dried blood crusted under his fingernails—it is strange, what stands out to you.  You drag him to safety, but you can already tell with enough dread to make you retch that is too late by far.

“Steven,” he gasps.

“James,” you tell him, desperately, feeling as though you’ve been kicked in the stomach, and you rip his jacket open just in time to watch red bloom thick and warm over his chest.  The two littlest fingers on his left hand have been shot off, blood dripping down his forearm, wet and hot and it does not stop pulsing.  “Oh—oh, god, James—”

You know now how his blood smells, and when he grasps clumsily at your face, wet hand dragging over your mouth, you know how it tastes as well.  This knowledge disgusts you, but it doesn’t make your hold him any less close, doesn’t make you do anything but swallow, again and again, against the sudden cotton thickness of the back of your tongue.  You know how his blood tastes, and he is in your body, just as you have been in his body, and he cradles your face between his hands the way he has always done in the past—but now he is painting your cheeks red, he is mouthing words that you cannot quite discern.  You lean in closer, ear to his mouth—

“Find me,” he rasps, lips brushing the shell of your ear.  “Find me, Steven, find me—”

All you can do is nod, over and over again, until he expires in your arms.

 

* * *

 

You keep your promises, as empty as the words sound in the echoing confines of your own head.  You keep your promises, even the ones that he does not remember asking you to make; you find him, over and over again, you chase after the animal tracks he left in his wake, you follow the scent of his heart like a bloodhound.  You know how his blood smells, you know what his blood tastes like, so you know how to track down his injured, limping form once you have caught his trail.

 _Bury me under his name_ , you think, every time you watch the light in his eyes fade into darkness.  _Bury me under his name so that when I claw my way out of the dirt his name is the first thing I see—_

You wake, in the morning, with your tongue pressed up against the roof of your mouth.  There are screams in your chest that you do not let yourself release, even in sleep—the sound gets tangled in your throat, leaves you gasping like a fish out of water, and when you struggle awake, you are twisted in the sheets with your arms flailing in a wild attempt to untangle yourself from your own skin.  You will spend every night like this, you will live out your years haunted by his phantom left limb—you will sleep, and you will dream, and you will spend each day of your life acutely aware of the space that he does not occupy.

Sometimes it comforts you to think that he misses you as well, even if he does not know what he is missing: you lie in your bed, aching, and you think of him, lying in his, with his estranged left hand curled into claws over his heart.  Both of you will sleep through the thick heat that wraps its sticky fingers around you.  Both of you will sweat out the fever that festers in your guts.  You are not nearly close enough to touch him, but when you press your hand against the wall nearest to you, you like to imagine that he, in his foreign bed, raises his hand to the wall next to him and presses back.

 

* * *

 

Winter

_WWI: 1914_

 

* * *

  

Growing up without him is a struggle.  James weighs on your mind constantly, a faint suggestion of what you’re missing pressing inexorably down on your knees, elbows, knuckles; all your joints ache, and you flex your hands restlessly as though that will hand him to you.  But he is not materialized between your itching palms, he is not delivered blinking and grinning to your doorstep, no matter how longingly you look out your window, fingertips smearing trails down the glass.  And you do look out your window with longing in the crease between your eyebrows—every dark-haired man that passes you on the street below is a kick to your stomach, every pair of blue eyes that do not carry lightning crackling in their gaze is a disappointment so bitter that you can taste it every time you swallow back against the feeling that you refuse to name.

The days are warm, but you can feel the sharp bite of his absence in the evenings, when you wrap yourself in a dozen blankets and imagine that it’s his arms around you instead.  You can still remember what it feels like to be wrapped up in him, if you close your eyes and concentrate hard enough.  You can still hear his heartbeat if you press your palm over your ear, like listening to a seashell, the sound of the waves rocking against the shore the way he rocks against your heart.

You have been influenced by the echo of his face for so long that the weeks—months—years—that go by without him do nothing to dim the fervor in your heart.  _Find me,_ he told you, so you look for him, you cast around with desperation stinging down your spine, but you cannot find the entirety of him in one place.  Here are his hands, on the arms of a red-haired, freckled dock worker.  Here are his broad shoulders, on the back of a stranger that you pass on the street.  Here is his laugh, from a child playing in the street with his friends, hat shoved on his head backwards, here is his arrogant smile full of fondness, here is his tuneless whistle, here is the sound of his footsteps creaking down the stairs.  You are always surprised that it is not actually him that is walking down the hall.  Your head snaps up every time you think you hear his voice.  But it is never him.

You know where you will find him.  You wish that he were just down the street, still within arm’s reach, but you know that he is not there.  You will find him in the war, as you always do.  You always find him in the war.

 

* * *

 

There is nothing for you when you enlist.  Your family is dead and buried, all your friends are already overseas, and it isn’t as though you have fallen in love, not with the ghost of James Barnes hovering over your shoulder.  There is a tug in the pit of your stomach telling you to travel, telling you to square your skinny shoulders and demand they take you to the war that has never quite left you—the sick, nauseating tug behind your navel that feels like a muscle cramp, it only eases when you step east, when you get closer to the edge of the shore.  He is waiting for you, you know that he is waiting for you, and anticipation makes your fingers curl into fists over your bent knees. 

There’s nothing for you in the city that you have lived in, biding your time.  There is nothing for you here.  You have been in this city the way an insect is in its cocoon—biding your time, wrapping your skinny arms around your body, waiting with baited breath for your bones to snap and your skin to split and your body to reform itself into something new and strange.  Foreign are your hands already; it would not take much to make your face in the mirror a stranger’s face.  His face, as always, is the face you know best, and although you have no photograph of him for you to keep in your breast pocket near your heart, the image of him in your head is strong enough to keep him close to you, to keep him at the forefront of your thoughts always.  It is, perhaps, unhealthy that you think of him this way—as the answer to every unspoken prayer, the savior of your shattered heart—but you could not think of him in any other way if you tried.  He is all of those things and more.  He is every word you never spoke, he is every place you have never gone, he is every name, every song, every verse of poetry, every sigh, every scream, every daydream, every nightmare—

He is everything.  He is all encompassing.  He is in France, so you enlist, and you follow where your heart directs you in the hope of finding his familiar, dirt-smudged face amongst the rubble.

 

* * *

 

He does not recognize you, of course, when you stumble upon him.  You are lucky and you are placed near to him in the barracks, near enough that you can look at him with the gaze of a starving man, near enough that you can stretch your arm out in the darkness and brush your fingertips against the toe of his boot on the ground.  (You do not do this often, of course, because it hurts you that he is so solid—it hurts the way it hurts when you draw a breath in too far and cough, an awful, wracking sound that always frightened your mother.  This is what it feels like to look at him, like there is something caught in your chest, something that you can’t dislodge.)

He is so near that he notices you watching, and he smiles ever so slightly, but his eyes—his lightning eyes, his hurricane eyes—are frozen, sparkling prettily the way icicles do.  It isn’t his fault, you think.  It is very cold here.

“Got a light?” you ask him, an ill-advised cigarette between your teeth.  Wordlessly, he strikes a match and cups his other hand around the flickering flame to draw it to your mouth, brows furrowed in concentration as he lights your cigarette for you.  He shakes out the match with deliberation when he’s through.  “Thanks,” you say, and take the small smile that he twitches at you as an invitation to join him where he’s sitting, looking over the dismal, foggy country in front of you.  His boots are laced up haphazardly, and his entire person appears just as shoddily put together—he is falling apart at the seams, there is something already snapped and unravelling in his head, you can see it in his eyes.

“Now tell me,” he says, tipping back his head to exhale a thin stream of smoke, eyes fluttering closed as if he can only focus on one sensation at a time.  “What a tiny little fuck like you is doin’ all the way out here.”

In anyone else’s mouth, the words would have stung, but he seems to ask out of genuine curiosity, and his tone is mild.  You clear your throat, fiddling with your cigarette.

“I’m running,” you tell him, and you let him nod and think that you mean _running away_ instead of _running forward_ , running toward him, running toward the inexorable conclusion that will end with his bloody, battered heart bleeding between your cupped palms.

 

* * *

 

The truth is, there’s very little you have ever had to call your own, and he, with his loose limbs and centuries-old sadness hovering in the back of his eyes, he is not so much _yours_ as you are _his_ , but it is close enough that you are possessive.  If you are possessive over his love or his life, you don’t know, but it is clear that you would like to possess him in some manner—his heart or his mind, his affection or his contempt, you will take whatever it is he will offer you and thank him for the effort.  Such is the life you live, such is the promise that you made him back when you could breathe without gasping and every footstep meant something.

You are older now.  Which is, perhaps, the greatest irony of them all—you are older now, so many years older than he will ever be, and though he does not know your face, the smile that he gives you is nearly the same.  That, along with the feeling of his knee knocking into yours, with his tongue curling around the word _comrade_ , is enough to make you put aside the burn in your throat long enough to call him the same.

Here you are, in the bunker that you have dug.  Here you are, inhaling mud.  Here you are, with one of his boots between your feet, here you are, letting him light your cigarette. You never thought it would feel this way.

“Isn’t like they told us it’d be, huh, James?” you ask him, your voice edging a little further on bleak than you’d intended.  Your thoughts linger on the propaganda posters wallpapered over your city at home, the hope that had filled your lungs like water dripping through a pinhole when you saw them, you plastering James’ face over every soldier’s picture.  You have been looking for him in strangers’ faces since the first time you remembered whose face it was you were missing.  Sometimes you saw the twist of his mouth on someone else’s face, sometimes the quirk of his brow, but you never saw his eyes.  You were always looking for his eyes.

He shoots you a strange look.  “My name’s Bucky,” he says, and narrows his eyes at you in a way that makes your stomach clench, but then orders are being given, and he has to tear his gaze away from the space dead between your eyes.  It is a discomfort, the fact that he has changed so much that you cannot even call him by the right name—he is a different man now, there is a different weight hanging in the back of his eyes, but you love him all the same, you love him no matter whose ghost haunts him.  No matter how hard his eyes are when they meet yours.

The trench is not what you were expecting when you arrived on this battlefield, but it is what is waiting for you, and as the ground swallows you up, you are filled with the unbearable thought that a man should not be buried twice—

You can feel his breath on the back of your neck in the cold darkness, and you have to close your eyes against the sensation before you give yourself away.

 

* * *

 

You have watched him lose his left arm enough times that it startles you, on occasion, to see him wearing it proudly and unbroken at his side.  There is an empty space at his left side, and it surprises you to see it filled by something that is flesh and blood, something that produces heat and a pulse and could not crush bone just by squeezing.  You could not have predicted that you would dread the times when he is whole, but you have watched him break off into pieces too many times to be comfortable, waiting for it to happen.

His absent arm is one of the few constants between your lives.  Two fingers or a whole fist, up to his elbow or up to his shoulder, it is always living on borrowed time, and it aches deep to the marrow of your bones that you have always failed at saving this part of him.  And it is true that you always fail, though it is also true that you try with every fiber of your being to save every cell of his body.  

You sometimes grip your own left arm, pad of your thumb at the crease of your elbow, feeling your pulse beat with the frantic rhythm of a man who knows that he is destined to fail at his mission.  You hesitate to use that word—it is a very loaded word—but you know what Bucky is to you, and though there are several words to describe it, _mission_ is the best.  He is your mission.  He is sometimes your lover, sometimes your brother, but he is always, always your mission.

 

* * *

 

The thing that you fear most, here in the trenches, is what every other man fears as well: gas.  They give you masks, of course they give you masks, but you do not trust them.  (You will never trust any mask, you will never pull the fabric over your face and trust that you will not die.)

James—Bucky—whoever he is—seems to cope with the nauseous anxiety of waiting by smoking every cigarette he can get his hands on and staring unblinkingly off into whichever distance is furthest from him.  You watch him like a drowning man, swallowing back the ice-water dread that slicks down your throat.  Would it fill your lungs, if you tipped your head back far enough?  Would you drown from this feeling?

You don’t really smoke, not in earnest, so any cigarette that falls into your possession is wordlessly passed to him.  Together, you both sit with your backs to the same dirt wall, your ankle an inch away from his—you would like to press your foot against his, you would like to bury your face in the crook of his neck, but his shoulders are curled enough to keep you at arm’s distance.

“You enlist?” he asks you, smoke trailing out of his mouth slowly, sluggishly.  His eyes are still bright.

“Yeah,” you say, tapping your fingertips against your bent knees.  “You?”

“Fuck, no,” he laughs.  It isn’t a nice sound—it’s broken glass and scraps of shrapnel—but it has been so long since you heard any laugh at all from him that you are almost willing to overlook how much it pains you to listen to him.  “I’ve got a sister at home.  Nothin’ short of the draft could tear me away.”

Guilt washes over you in a wave for wishing so strongly to find him here, when he has real family waiting for him at home.  He is your family, but you are not his, and your ice-water prayers that you should find him here seem, suddenly, incredibly selfish.  Of course you should not have found him here, of course you should not have asked for him at your side.  But you have asked for him in every world you have ever lived in, and you do not think you will ever stop.  Perhaps you are destined to be selfish by nature.  Perhaps the reason he does not remember you is because he is trying to get away.

“I’m sorry,” you tell him, miserably.

“Ain’t your fault,” he says, frowning, and nudges you with his knee.

You bite your tongue and do not tell him that it _is_ your fault, that it is your hoping and your screaming heart that called him to this place against his will.  It is your fault, and you are sorry, though you know that there is little you would not do to call him back to you time and time again, there is little that you would not do in order to hold his face between your small dirty hands and have him remember your eyes the way you remember his.  _Please, oh, god, please let him look at my face and see the echo of every face I have ever worn,_ you think, tongue pressed to the roof of your mouth.  _Please let him see through every layer of paint I am wearing on my body._

“Still sorry,” you say, shrugging a shoulder.

“You’re an odd one, Steve Rogers,” Bucky sighs, stretching his legs out, closing the distance between your ankle and his and hooking them together.  You are frozen, spine closer to shattering into ice shards than you are particularly comfortable with, but you can feel the barest impression of warmth through his pant leg, and that is more than enough.

“That’s what they keep telling me,” you murmur, toes curling in your boots.

 

* * *

 

Although it’s Bucky that you are closest to, there are other men here that you appreciate.  Other men you have come to rely on, when everything else is cold, and your fingers hurt with a bone-deep ache that makes you want to curl in on yourself until there’s nothing left—you are concerned your fist will shatter if you strike it against something, you are half convinced that there is nothing in the world that could save your body from the onslaught of the winter.  There are men here in the trenches, though, that keep you hoping for spring.

Sometimes you will crowd together, all your legs touching, Bucky on one side of you with his sharp eyes cutting into the soft spot just beneath your ear.  Then, together, in low voices, you and these men here that you have befriended will sing the songs that are humming in your chests.  It is almost like home, when you are singing like this, the melody warming your blue lips when they fall out of your mouth.  Bucky never sings, but he leans into the sound like it can seep into his skin if he tries hard enough, like there is something in him that cannot stop reaching for the tune.  And you do not begrudge him his silence, though you miss the sound of his voice; he gives you soft, quiet words when everyone else is sleeping, talking around the cigarette in his mouth, and that is so very close to enough.  In any case, it’s more than you thought you were getting.

Most of what you have seen of this war so far is waiting.  There is an enemy that is close to you, an enemy that you can feel if you close your eyes and rest your helmeted head against the dirt wall behind you, but you can’t see them.  The lull in the violence will not last, you know that.  Bucky, with his hollow smile, with his empty eyes, seems to know this as well.  So you sit, with these men who sing love songs into the darkness, and you wait for sunrise.  It will be a red dawn.

 

* * *

 

In your life—in all your lives—there have been a limited number of times where you have felt safe in your body.  Your skin is tight around your bones.  Your breath is unsteady in your lungs.  You have been a stranger to yourself since the first moment that you could spell his name—you have always defined yourself through him.  And perhaps this is wrong (or at least unhealthy), but there isn’t much you know how to change, when it comes to him.  He is a fact of life.  Sky blue, leaves green, James Buchanan Barnes is the only part of your godforsaken life that _means_ anything.

You would know.  You pray to any god that will listen that you will get to keep him this time, you have been praying for him even when you doubted that anyone was listening—and it’s difficult, putting any faith in that which you cannot see, but every time you die, you wake again to the knowledge that you will find him again, so perhaps there is a higher force above you who cares for you.  If you are cursed or blessed is a matter, you suppose, of perspective.

 

* * *

 

The days are grey.  The nights are grey.  The smoke that curls out of Bucky’s mouth in tendrils is grey, your face—ashen-pale and cold—is grey, your fingertips are grey, there is a certain part of you that has begun to suspect that the entirety of you will be grey by the time the war has spit you back out again.

Bucky, with his electric-charge eyes, is as far from grey as he could possibly be.  His skin is pale, dirt-smudged but white all the same.  His mouth is red.  His hair is inky-black, eyes blue, veins green at his wrists; you wish you could drag your fingertips up his forearms, tracing the green latticework that branches visibly under his skin.  Would his skin become translucent if wet, like paper?  Would you be able to see his thick heart beating?  You think it would be nice, to suck kisses directly over his lungs, over his arteries, over his pulse that you can see jumping at his throat when you watch him directly before combat.  He is beautiful, during combat.  He is beautiful and it breaks your heart, because this is not a Bucky that you are allowed to touch, this is not a Bucky that belongs to you in the slightest, though he curls close to you sometimes as you lean against the wall of the trench in which you have buried ourselves alive.

He is beautiful in combat.  He moves with the grim assurance of somebody who has put many bullets into many heads, somebody who has slashed knives across throats with practiced ease.  Bucky is good at killing people.  So, at your heart, are you, but in a different way—where he is grim and vicious, you are uncertain.  No less vicious when you strike, but you do not trust your body not to let you down when you are thick in the heat of the battle.  There is so much inside of you that has the potential to break, and though you know, intellectually, that Bucky has the same potential deaths crackling between the muscles and ligaments of his body, he has been here for months longer than you and he has bent, but he has not broken.  You can feel yourself snapping under his harsh gaze.

“Stay near me,” he mutters as you march in formation, clunky boots too big on your small feet as you stomp toward the enemy that is lurking near, making the hair on the back of your neck stand up in anticipation.

“What are you planning on doing, shielding me from the rest of the world with your body?” you ask flatly, stuffing your helmet a little lower on your head.  Your rifle rests against your shoulder as you walk, fingers curled around the wood in a white-knuckled grasp.  You are at least half a head shorter than everyone else next to you, but Bucky does not look at you like you are smaller than all the rest.  (Bucky looks at you, in fact, like you are the largest thing he has ever seen.)

“If that’s what it takes,” he says, jaw square, eyes hard. 

You frown, shooting him an odd sidelong look out of the corners of your eyes.  “If that’s what it takes to do what?” you want to know, cold-bitten lips red and cracking from where you’ve wetted them over and over again, a nervous habit.

“To keep you alive,” he answers slowly, as though it should be obvious, and your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth.  His brows are pulled together, a small crease between them, and you think, for a moment, _careful, Rogers, careful, oh, careful_ , before you swallow back whatever it is that has risen up in your throat and you manage to find your voice once more.

“Funny,” you say, voice thick.  “I was thinking the same thing.”

Bucky twitches something that may be an attempt at a smile, says nothing, just turns his head forward again to look toward the fingers of light cutting through the fog.

 

* * *

 

Taking a life has never been an easy decision for you to make.  Too many times have you looked down at the blood on your hands and thought, _why_ , _why is this the best choice_ —but then Bucky will make the twisting-bright face that he does when he squints his eyes up at the sun and you reach for your dirty handkerchief to clean the red off your blade without further deliberation.  It isn’t easy, taking a life, but it is what makes it possible for you to stay close to him, and you believe firmly that you are fighting for something important, something real.  The thread that strings all your lives together like pearls on a chain is not just Bucky, after all—it is the War, it is what you were created to become, it is the violence that has nested inside the marrow of your bones. 

So you take the lives that you deem necessary to take, you fire your rifle with Bucky at your back, you do your damnedest to clench your jaw against the worry that bubbles up like bile in your throat.  And perhaps you take some joy in it, in fighting for the sake of the revolution that has never left the rapid-fire beating of your heart, but it is Bucky—handing you ammunition, baring his teeth like an animal as blood drips down his forehead—that fills you with almost religious adulation.

Pray for him, if you still can.  Or better yet—pray for yourself.  You will need it.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes you think it would be better if you died first.  You never do, but sometimes you think you would like a little rest between lives—you wake up tired, no matter how many hours you sleep, no matter how deep you sink into your dreams.  You are so very tired.

I does not occur to you that Bucky might someday be grateful that he has never had to watch you die.

 

* * *

 

There is a rhythm to the battles.  It is an unwieldy rhythm, awkward, maybe, but it is a rhythm all the same: you know your place in the battles.  There is no room for melodrama when you have a gun in your hand, no room for wistful daydreaming or looking at Bucky’s face with all the longing that has twisted your insides into something strange.  There is a rhythm to the battles, and you sometimes cannot keep up with the rest of the men whose bodies have not yet betrayed them, but Bucky always seems to be ready to catch your elbow when you stumble.  He is always looking ahead when he does this.  If he is saving his embarrassment or yours, however, remains a mystery.

The two of you, at each other’s backs, bleeding on the same inhalation: you have never felt this close to someone before, even if he does not know you the way that you know him.  You have never once felt more alive, you have never felt more that your breaths are pushing you toward a higher goal.  And Bucky, whose spine is ever so slightly crooked, Bucky, with mud smudged under his lower lip, he is so alive that it hurts to look at him.  There is so much in him, you think, that has the potential to explode in a star-burst like a grenade—his manic grin is incendiary, it could spark if he bares his teeth hard enough.

Sometimes, in battle, he looks a little like he is going to be sick.  Sometimes he looks like he could rip out the nearest man’s throat with his teeth.  You are never certain who you are fighting alongside, but you love both of them, you love that he is deadly and you love that he is as vulnerable as you feel.

“What’ll you do when you go home?” you ask him, because his hands are shaking, and there is blood smeared over the curve of his skinny wrist: he needs the distraction, and you can provide it for him if you try.  “Take care of your sister?”

“What home?” he asks dully.  “What sister?  This is where I live now.”

Cautiously, carefully, like you are approaching a wild animal, you reach your hand out, smoothing it over his left knee.  He looks up at you sharply but he does not pull away, though the look in his eyes is jagged enough that it makes your mouth run dry.

“We’ll get out of this,” you promise him.  “We’ll get out, Bucky, you and me, we’ll get home.”  It makes you feel disgusting, this deliberate misdirection, but you know that you will get out of this war and into his arms again even if the both of you fall at the will of the other army’s bullets.  There are a thousand different futures laid at your feet, and you will race down all of them, running toward Bucky’s flickering silhouette.  He is looking at you dubiously because he does not know.  He does not know that you will follow after him until your feet bleed.  (Most likely, though it makes your stomach twist, you will follow him after, as well.)

“You can’t promise me that shit,” he tells you, voice rough, his bloody hand scraping over your cheek to anchor at the nape of your neck.  “You can’t promise me that shit, so don’t say it.”

You close your eyes, bite your tongue so you don’t lean into the palm of his hand.  “Alright.”

“I mean it,” he says harshly, the pad of his thumb catching on the bruise-like shadows underneath your eye.  “Don’t say it, Steve, I mean it.”

“I said alright,” you say, eyes still resolutely closed.  You do not want to see the look on his face, you do not want to arch into this particular touch if you can avoid it.  It feels too much like the way he touched you last time, his two missing fingers scraping over your cheekbone and leaving hot blood in their wake.  This Bucky is not dead yet.  You have to keep reminding yourself that he is not dead, that the life that burns brightly in his eyes during battle is not an ephemeral thing, that he is still alive when he is not fighting with a cry building up in his throat.  He is still alive in the quiet.  You wish you knew why it is so hard to accept this as fact.

He takes his hand back when you are joined by the man on watch, telling him to take his turn.  You open your eyes in time to watch his retreating back.

 

* * *

 

It is when he is on watch that he is struck.  _It could happen to anybody_ , they tell you, tight voices echoing in your head as you race to the infirmary.  _No one’s mistake.  War is unpredictable._

You would agree with them if you did not know so intimately that every war is the same, that you knew, somewhere in your heart, that something terrible was going to bloom as quicksilver-sharp as a scalpel to bone.  You have never been so disgusted to be proven right.

He is asleep when you find him.  Every bed in the infirmary is filled.  For a moment, you think you are going to be sick—every man here is quietly bleeding to death, every man here has the glassy-eyed look of someone who has seen the end of their life in front of them and finds themselves sinking into it faster and faster without their consent.  (You have seen Bucky wear this look on his face too many times to appreciate it with any degree of curiosity, morbid or otherwise—his mouth is always half-parted when he has this look on his face, throat working around words that would taste too bitter to speak.)

You brush his hair off of his forehead with your fingertips, smoothing back the dark errant lock that falls over his eyes.  You studiously do not look at his left side, at the arm that is missing from the crease of his elbow downwards, though the void of his limb makes your own left side ache in sympathy.

“Oh, James,” you murmur, heart stinging, and sit on the side of his bed gingerly.  He does not stir.  Someone, somewhere, is wailing, like their heart is being actively broken, like they are watching their souls dribble out of their bodies in a pulsing gush.  You watch him lying in his bed, all the many colors of his body seeming to have seeped into the ground underneath him.  The red of his cheeks has faded into a grey blush, his blue eyes shut, half-parted lips a dull, lifeless pink.  It has finally happened, you realize with growing dread.  The war has painted him grey.

You can’t sit with him for long.  You stay by his side as long as they allow you, your fingertips tracing the network of veins down his right forearm to where they disappear at his wrist.  They tell you that he will not survive long, and you do not think it is said with nearly enough sympathy, but you suppose that every bed that is filled by a near-dead body takes up a bed that can potentially be used for someone on the brink of life, instead.  You can’t blame them for their pragmatism, even if it makes your blood boil.

Every one of your inhalations catches when it scrapes down your throat, but you have a duty to this war that is not to Bucky, as much as it pains you to think on it, so you allow yourself to be dragged away with Bucky’s ashen face framed in your sight by your wet eyelashes.

You perform your duties with the hollow movements of a half-dead individual, tongue numb, fingers numb, impervious now to the cold that even yesterday bit at every inch of your exposed skin.  Your fellow soldiers seem to know to give you a wide berth.  You are grateful, though you are close to screaming at them—you have just found Bucky, really, you felt his hand on your face for the first time in a lifetime not even twelve hours ago, you have just found him, and already he is being taken away.  Your fellow soldiers shy away, and you do not blame them.  You would be frightened of your own face, if you could see it.

He is dead when you get back.  You knew that he would be, but they take his body away before you can kiss his forehead, they take him away before you can touch the soft skin at his throat one last time, they take him away and all that you are left with is his jacket, torn at the sleeve, collar crooked.

You bury your face in the crooked collar and breathe in his scent, eyes squeezed closed.  His scent mingles with that of freshly turned dirt.

 

* * *

 

Every soldier’s face is not his face.  Every stranger that you pass does not have his electricity eyes.  And perhaps your fingers fumble with your gas mask because you are numb without him, perhaps you don’t do up the straps right because you simply do not have the capacity to care anymore—but whatever the reason, it is not fastened completely when the bitter tang reaches you, fear and relief making your tongue thick in your mouth.

You spend three days in the infirmary doing your damnedest to cough up your lungs.  The gas burns you from the inside out, you can’t believe you ever thought that burning would be a better death than freezing, you spit up blood and all you can think is _I’m coming, Bucky, I’m coming home._

 

* * *

 

Spring

_WWII: 1918_

 

* * *

 

You remember him like a tattoo on your mind, you remember him like he has been branded on the skin of your wrists, the skin at the nape of your neck, the soft insides of your knees—all the places of you that are most vulnerable, his name written on every inch of your body.  You look down at your arms and you see him between your fingers, in the joints of your elbows, you see him when your knees hit the ground and you tip your head back, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of the rain that splatters your face.  You can feel it when the rain drips down your spine in splinters that freeze when they hit your skin.  You are ice, without him.  You are ice.

He is ice as well, but he, with his slick hair and steady hands, with his dangerous grin, he is not frozen all the way through.  You know that there is something warm inside him, some ember that has not quite burned itself out—and he might spend the rest of eternity digging for it, he might spend the rest of eternity elbow-deep in his own guts, but you know he is looking for it.  You know that he will breathe on the ember until it reignites and he knows you the way you know him.

Until he sees your face and knows you for who you are—who you have been—who you always will be—you will sit, blinking frost off your eyelashes, and waiting, waiting for him to thaw.

 

* * *

 

“How many goddamn times do I have to tell you not to get yourself killed?” Bucky asks you, helping you to your feet with exasperation and fondness in the way he rolls his eyes.  But he’s dusting you off before you can give him an indignant reply, his hands smoothing out the tear at the seam of your shirt at the shoulder, and you assume that your bloody knuckles are answer enough to his question.

“He was a jerk,” you say, shrugging a shoulder placidly. 

Bucky’s eyes narrow suspiciously at you. “One of these days I’m gonna find you in a ditch,” he says warningly, but he also slings an arm around your shoulders to lead you home, so you can only surmise that you’ve been forgiven.  “And I’m gonna go all the way down to hell just so I can drag you back up to earth and kill you again for scarin’ me.”

“That’s sweet,” you say, grinning up at him.  “Bucky Barnes, you _do_ care.”

“Sweet my ass,” he mutters, and holds you closer.  “I’m in too deep, that’s what.”

You’re the one who’s in too deep, but you don’t say as much, just let him guide you home, let him think that he is the one who is caring for you, rather than the other way around.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes you lie in your bed, listening to him snoring softly on the other side of the room, and you wonder how it came to be, that you should have him here in peace-time.  In every other life you have lived, you have had to search for him, had to throw yourself like a javelin into whichever war was consuming your country.  But here he is, sleeping across the room from you, one bare foot dangling over the edge of his bed where it fell out from between the covers.  Here he is, the orange streetlamp glow outside the window casting strange shadows over his face.  His half-parted lips could be mouthing words, but you can’t tell from this angle—both of you tend to mutter in your sleep.

He asks you in the morning who you were calling for in the middle of the night.  You tell him you don’t remember.

 

* * *

 

This Bucky is quick to smile and slow to anger.  The somber, grey-faced man in the trenches has bloomed into someone whose smile is like the first rays of sunshine cutting through clouds.  It has been so long since you’ve been warm that you aren’t certain how you’re meant to recover, when every touch he gives you—freely, warmly, palm curled around the nape of your neck, his ankle hooked around yours under the kitchen table—shines bright enough that it blinds you.  You are dazzled in his presence.

He still doesn’t remember that he knew you before 1926, but he seems to love you all the same, his fingertips just barely pressed to the small of your back as he leads you into a dance hall.  He will drink himself silly and dance with everybody’s date.  You will sit at the bar, nursing your one glass, and you will watch him with a fondness that hurts, smiling back when he shoots a glance at you over a girl’s shoulder, eyes beaming.

 

* * *

 

He comes home some nights with lipstick smeared over the curve of his jaw, the slope of his pale throat—you remember noting the vibrant colors of his body, but you find that you don’t appreciate the color that other people put on him.  Bruises and lipstick and blood at the corner of his mouth: all the same, all disgusting and impossible for you to stomach.  So you sit him down on the edge of the bathtub, wetting a washcloth with the sink faucet, and you clean the red from his throat with your jaw clenched.

“Y’don’t have’ta do this, Steve,” he tells you, tipping his head further to the side obligingly so you can reach the smudge-marks easier.  He’s still tipsy, eyes half lidded, and his smile is lazy.  He’s always loose and pliant when drunk, and it makes it easier to maneuver him around, though it contrasts strangely with the brittle exterior of the Bucky you knew during the Great War.

“What, and let you get lipstick all over your sheets?  I’m the one who does the laundry, so no thanks,” you reply flatly, and scrub harder.  

“Steve Rogers, always lookin’ out for me,” he sighs, and all is quiet for a long time, save for the sound of your cloth rubbing against his skin.

“Now, tell me, Buck, d’you always go for the dame with the most vampire-like impulses?” you demand after a minute, frowning in concentration.  “’Cause I swear, she could’a broke skin here.”

Bucky laughs.  You can feel the vibration in his throat beneath your fingers.  “Hey, the undead don’t have it so bad,” he says, grinning.  “Gettin’ to live forever ain’t shabby.  I wouldn’t mind that too much.”  You fumble the cloth, dropping it onto his leg.  When you pick it up again, it has left a wet mark on the knee of his trousers. 

“Shut the hell up, Bucky,” you say, though it’s weary enough that it doesn’t sound half as harsh as you meant it.

Bucky obeys, for which you are grateful.

 

* * *

 

Brooklyn, the city in which you reside, isn’t a perfect city.  But between the dirty pavement and the smoky sky is the only place you could ever think of as home, and he is waiting for you inside your apartment, hips swaying back and forth ever so slightly to the rhythm of the music warbling from the radio.  He sings along—poorly—and that’s what’s ringing in your ears, Bucky’s bad singing, when you climb the stairs clutching your side.

“Steve!” he calls out happily as you ascend the stairs, but his grin falls the second he sees the state you’re in.  You want to laugh, because isn’t that usually your job?  Your face crumpling when you watch him bleed, your pulse hammering out a kick-drum beat just beneath the skin at your throat, your panicked eyes darting from his hands to his face and back again?  His hands are wet—he was doing the dishes before you came home—but he catches you up in his arms anyway, supporting your weight as he half-carries you to the couch in the living room.  His music is still playing in the kitchen, Billie Holiday’s warm voice almost jarring in contrast to the pounding of your head.

“Hey, Bucky,” you say, patting clumsily at his cheek.

“What the fuck, Steve,” he says, batting your hands away so he can examine your injuries.  “What did you do, take on an army?”

“Not this time,” you tell him, wincing when he pokes at a tender bruise.  “But the evening’s still young, I guess.”

Bucky gapes at you, disbelieving, until you shove at him and order him to get the first aid kit.  Even then, he’s still shaking his head back and forth while he walks to the bathroom, hips no longer swaying with the rhythm of the music.

 

* * *

 

When you mother died, you were certain that there was something hollow in you, echoing.  When you were quiet enough, you could hear the reverberations in your chest, your thick throat making it difficult for you to breathe—you lay on your bed on your back, feet on the floor, hands folded over your stomach.  And Bucky, whose family is loud, Bucky who had never once had to be alone by anything other than choice, he kicked your right foot and passed you a house key in the same breath.

From that day forward the both of you lived in limbo, but you’ve known from the start that it could not end well.  You aren’t meant to live in peace, you aren’t meant to live where you do not have a gun in your hand.  Bucky does not know this because he sheds his past lives like snakeskin, can easily let the past slip away through his fingers like grains of sand.  But you are not an hourglass, you are flypaper, every memory, every drop of blood, every time you’ve lost him sticking to your skin like birthmarks.  You wish, sometimes, that you could let the past slide down your spine like beads of sweat until you are no one but yourself, no creature but a creature that was born in 1918, underweight and wailing, wailing with your heart already broken in advance.

Your past sits in your back pocket despite your half-formed wishes.  You have more than one life to give to your country, so you give her all of them, you give her everything that you have clutched in your clammy palms, every dream, every clumsy kiss to Bucky’s forehead.  You know from the start of this life that this Bucky, who still smiles so easily, will not stay with you for long.  There is a war on the horizon, there is always a war on the horizon, you can feel it in your bones, all the way to the marrow.

 

* * *

 

There is a tipping point in every life, one razor-thin edge that separates a life in which he loves you and a life in which he doesn’t.  This Bucky touches you all the time, curls up in bed with you when you are sick and need the warmth, but he never slides a leg between your own and he never kisses the corner of your bruised mouth.  You would do it yourself if he didn’t seem to intent on his dancing, so convinced that he could find his drifting soul in the swish of a skirt and the bottom of a whiskey glass.  You would do it yourself if you were not the coward that would rather die than face a world without him.

So you wait.  You wait for him to close the distance and you wait for him to fall asleep before you shift your position in your bed, turning around to look at his sleeping face.  Many people look younger at rest, as though the years on their faces are smoothed out when they aren’t awake to carry the weight.  Bucky looks decades older, even though his mouth is slack, even though the crease between his brows is smooth.  Bucky, in sleep, is ancient.

When your eyes are closed, so are you.

 

* * *

 

Bucky’s face is ashen-pale when he gets home from his day on the docks, his movements clumsy and heavy when he kicks of his work boots and shoulders out of his jacket to hang it up.  Then, left in his shirt sleeves and suspenders, hair mussed from the wind outside, he hovers in the kitchen doorway with a couple papers clutched in one hand.

“Are you happy?” he asks you, voice numb.

You nod, uncertain of where he’s going.  “Sure I am.  Why, Buck?  What happened?”

Bucky just shakes his head, shaking off the look you shoot him as well.  “’Cause I—I did my best, pal,” he continues.  “I know we don’t have much—” A quick glance around your shabby apartment, then, shame obvious in the way his mouth twists.  “But we’re.  We’ve got a good thing going, you ‘n me. Yeah?”

“Of course we do,” you say, concerned, and rise from the kitchen table, crossing to him so you can take his shoulders in both your hands.  “What’s going on, huh?  Talk to me, you’re scarin’ me here.”

Wordlessly, he shoves the papers in his hands at you, and you can only read the word _drafted_ before your fingertips go numb and you have to clutch at the counter behind you to steady yourself.

“Oh,” you say, and try to swallow, but you can’t force the dread down your throat.  “Oh, god.”

And so it goes, as it always goes.  The war swallows him whole every time.

 

* * *

 

All would proceed how it has in the past, except they won’t take you this time.  You and Bucky have had this argument before in many different configurations— _no, Steve, fighting that guy is a bad idea, even if he’s an asshole, no, Steve, for fuck’s sake, you’re sick, stay in bed before you cough up something important_ —but this time you will not let yourself be steered away from your purpose, no matter how pale Bucky gets, no matter how much he looks like he is swallowing ghosts.  He is heading into war, after all, and this is what you are _best_ at, this is the one area where his strong arms and straight back cannot match you.  This is what you are best at.  You will not sit back and watch him walk into it blind.

“You tried to enlist _again?_ ” he demands, and you watch his fists curl and uncurl, over and over again, with curiosity.  Would he strike you?  If you angered him enough, if you pushed him enough, would he strike you?  The Great War's Bucky would have, you know that for a fact.  James Barnes of the Sons of Liberty would have as well, though he would have apologized afterwards, would have frowned at you and checked your face for bruises in the same breath.  But this Bucky, this Bucky who wears lipstick stains like badges of honor, you can’t tell yet if he has enough venom under his tongue to lash out in the way of his predecessors.

“Of course I did, Bucky,” you say, tilting your chin up.  It is a challenge.  _Hit me or give in_ , it says.  “It’s my goddamn duty.”

Bucky, to your surprise, does not do either.  He grabs both your lapels in his warm, broad hands and yanks you into a kiss that feels like a demand on your soul, a clash of teeth and lips that would have been painful if you weren’t so overwhelmingly grateful that you couldn’t breathe for it.  You kiss him back, winding your hands into his dark hair, messing up the careful slicked-back angles with your fists.  You watch him comb pomade into his hair every morning—you’ve wanted to muss it since the beginning.

“They’re never gonna take you,” he mutters between kisses, one arm sliding around your skinny waist to pull your body close to his.  “Give it up, Rogers, they’re never gonna take you.”

“Shut the hell up, Bucky,” you say, not for the first time, and pull him back in.  Bucky, after an exasperated groan that you can feel against your mouth, obeys.

 

* * *

 

It is immeasurably unfair that it is the night before he leaves that you get your first opportunity to wrestle him out of his clothes.  With war hovering just out of reach, your fingertips brushing the edge of the map, he mouths down your body until he reaches your hipbone.  His hair is in complete disarray by this point, which you take pride in, twisting your fingers in it hard enough to make him pant against the skin of your stomach.  He seems to like that, so you do it again, and this time he makes a low, soft sound against the skin of your inner thigh.

When he takes you into his mouth, it makes your head ring, like a bombshell went off close enough to make your brain echo, close enough that you can feel the reverberations all the way down into your core.  Bucky is sloppy and enthusiastic, glancing up at you through his eyelashes every once in a while to make sure that you’re still with him.  (You are.  Oh, god, you are.)

“Ah, Buck—” you hiss, pulling your fistful of his hair again, though it is mostly an involuntary movement.  Bucky moans all the same, and you have heard him cry out in agony, you have heard the choked-off sounds of anguish that get tangled up in his throat when he looks down at his missing left arm, but you have never been kicked in the gut so hard as when he moans like that, his breath audibly unsteady.  You didn’t think you would get this again.  You are surprised every time he falls off the razor-edge onto the side of loving you, you are so surprised that he wants this body that has tailed him doggedly from life to life for as long as you can remember—

“Quit thinkin’ so hard,” he demands breathlessly, sucking a wet kiss onto your hipbone when the opportunity presents himself.  “If you’re a million miles away, I ain’t doin’ it right.”

“Sorry,” you gasp, shakily returning his quicksilver-sharp smile, and can’t help the whine that curls your tongue when he bends back to his task.

 

* * *

 

He ships off.  You are shaking the entire time you are watching him leave, shaking like a leaf in autumn, though the day is warm enough that you have no cause to be cold.  But Bucky leaving you for any extended period of time chills you to the bone, it always has, and you doubt that this is something about you that has the potential to change.  Many things about you can shift from life to life, but this, this coldness that slicks down your throat with every breath, this is a constant.

That last imprint of where his hand rested over your throat remains warm, however.

When Erskine finds you, eyes kind enough to make you suspicious, you don’t hesitate to say yes.  You have enlisted four times to no avail.  You will take any opportunity that presents itself to you.  And perhaps Bucky will yell at you later, will look at you and bare his teeth in disgust, but you have watched him change so many times.  It is now his turn to do the same.  Besides, you know that it won’t kill you.  After all, you never die first.

 

* * *

 

Logically, you know that it will hurt when the serum is injected into your veins.  You have been stabbed, and shot, and you have inhaled gas that lit up a brush fire in your lungs—you have burned, you have frozen, you have been buried alive—but you have also cradled Bucky’s body in your arms, watching him gasp for his last breath like a fish, so any pain that you will feel in the belly of Howard Stark’s machine is incidental.  That is what you are thinking when you step into the machine, when you let them strap you inside and tie you down with grim faces.  Any pain you will feel will be incidental.

It is not incidental.  It is every pain that you have ever felt, all at once—it is your heart breaking over and over again, it is getting kicked in the gut in every dark alley in Brooklyn, it is the open flowering of blood at your stomach when you’re shot in the trenches, it is every pain you have ever felt, gnawing its way into your bones.  This is what it feels like, to be made into kindling by the war.  You can hear your bones snapping in your ears, skin stretching and tightening, your eyes blinded by the feeling of being broken apart and reformed into a body you were never meant to have.

You were never meant to have it, but it is yours now, every muscle and ligament and dusty blond hair.  It is yours and you must use for what it was built for: for killing, for fighting, for fighting your way back to Bucky from now until the end of time.

 

* * *

 

They do not put a gun in your hands and shove you off into war, though.  They stuff you in a pair of tights and push you onstage, your feet stumbling over each other while you try not to fumble your words too badly.  This is not what you wanted, this is not what you envisioned.  Bucky is out there somewhere, fighting for his life with his jaw clenched hard enough to make his teeth crack, and you are singing and dancing your stupid little heart out in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the front lines where you belong.

This life has done to you what no other life has done.  It has twisted your heart inside out until you want to live, until you would rather live out of the reach of the war that hits you with a familiarity that makes you ill.  You would rather live in your grimy Brooklyn apartment with Bucky’s head pillowed on your thigh, Billie Holiday wrapping you both in her voice’s warm embrace, the sweet taste of summer curling thick in the air.  You would like it, you think, if you would never have to be cold again.  You would like it if you could make sure Bucky was never cold.

They call you the Star Spangled Man with a Plan when you’re all decked out in your country’s flag.  You are star spangled, and you have a plan, but it isn’t the plan they’ve written for you: grab Bucky, press your lips to the battlefield in thanks for her efforts, kill Hitler, and kiss Bucky with the taste of his laughter on your tongue.  You are star spangled, and you are resolved.

 

* * *

 

Peggy Carter, with her hands on her hips and her chin tilted up, has more spitfire in her than you knew was possible for one person to have.  Her lipstick is war paint, you come to realize the longer you know her, and she could kill you as soon as glance at you if she so chose.  The war has not consumed her, but you wonder if _she_ has consumed the war instead—she thrives for the struggle, for the justice that she pursues with determination that you admire as much as you envy.  She is very beautiful.  She’s the kind of woman that would turn Bucky down if he dared to ask her to dance.

She also seems to respect you, which is why, when you find out that there is a good chance Bucky is dead already (your stomach drops, you will have to start over _again_ , and you just got him, his mouth was on your mouth two months ago) she shoves a map in your hand and pushes you onto Howard Stark’s tiny plane in the same gesture. 

“He’s most likely dead,” she tells you as she sits, smoothing out her skirt, every word crisp thanks to her English accent.

“Then don’t expect me home in time for supper,” is your grim reply.

 

* * *

 

You always find him in the war.  He is there in between one bloodshed and the next, he’s always there, the war has shaped him as much as it has shaped you, it is naïve of you to ever have entertained the idea that the both of you could live in a world that is not defined by fingers of fire licking up your legs.

You leap out of the plane without a parachute, but you land on your feet.  You enter the HYDRA compound with disgust filtering into your lungs the way illness has crushed your throat in the past.  This is what you do, this is the only thing you know how to do, and you will do it, though dread at what is to come weighs you down more than your new shield ever could.  You’ll find him, and then you’ll lose him.  It is as inevitable as the next war that will rip your new body to shreds.

You race down the hallways of the base with your pulse in your ears.  Will he be whole, when you find him?  Has the war eaten his left arm already?  Will he babble the way your shell-shocked friends in the trenches babbled?  Will he be painted grey as the echoing silence that choked him in the fogged wasteland of France?  He was so bright back in Brooklyn, so full of life; you know that you fed off that life, even if you didn’t mean to.  It was the one thing that kept you upright, some days.  You regret that now, the selfishness of your dependence on him—he needed all of his life, every spark that ignited in his stomach, and you swallowed the flames before they could warm him any.

“Bucky,” you say, caught in the doorway, when you find him.  Your voice holds, within it, more emotion than you could ever twist into words.  There is no formula for this love, no variables you can plug in to uncover the right metaphor, the right imagery.  You love him.  You love him the way relief washes over you—you love him in steady waves, you love him down to the tips of your toes, you feel his absence nearly as strongly as his presence.

He doesn’t hear you, doesn’t see you, not until you rush to his bedside, one strange, large hand brushing over his cheekbone before sliding down to his neck to check his pulse.  (Fluttering, you note, like a hummingbird’s wings.)

“Hey, hey,” you say brokenly, tipping his face toward yours until he's holding your gaze.  He’s still reciting his name, rank, and serial number, over and over again, voice dead.  _Sergeant Barnes, 107 th. 32557038.  Sergeant Barnes, 107th, 32557038— _“Hey, yeah, there you are, Buck,” you hear yourself saying the moment he stutters to as stop, but the words are tumbling out of your mouth without your permission, one after the other before you can make heads or tails of your own mind.  “It’s me, I’m here, I’m sorry I wasn’t quicker—”

“Steve,” Bucky exclaims, delighted, though it is a weary sort of delight.  His voice is slurred.  “Steve, we were—where’re the trenches?”

You look at him blankly.  “There’re no trenches, Bucky.”

He frowns, surprised for a moment, until you can watch the world fall down to press between his shoulder blades once more.  You can see it in the way his eyelids flutter.  “’Course there ain’t,” he mumbles.  Then, petulantly— “Weren’t you smaller?”

 

* * *

 

You remember the hollow look in his eyes in the trenches.  There was something eating him up from the inside out, gnawing at whatever was left wrapped up in his skin, you know that look in his eyes enough to recognize it on his face again as you walk back to base camp, new comrades at your sides.  You don’t know what they did to him in that HYDRA base to put the concave shadows back in his eyes.  He does not volunteer the information.

Dum-Dum Dugan, chevrons on his bowler hat, offers you a cigarette while you walk, and you are about to decline, but then you think better of it, passing it along wordlessly to Bucky.  His hand comes up to take it automatically, the same motion that the both of you had perfected down to a science in WWI.  He seems surprised at himself when he takes it, because this Bucky doesn’t smoke, this Bucky tried once and decided, coughing hard, that smoking was for _suckers and idiots and people with lungs made of fuckin’ iron._

“I don’t have a lighter,” he says numbly, frowning at the cigarette in between his forefinger and thumb.  Gabe Jones, on his other side, retrieves his without question.  Everyone is too tired for questions.

You look at him with something heavy and dark in your eyes, you look at him and watch him smoke without coughing, you look at him and you wonder which Bucky you’re looking at.

 

* * *

 

They give you a new team.  Well, they tell you they’re going to give you a team, and when you tell them with your jaw squared that you already have one, they find that they can’t argue with you well.  They are frightened of you.  Your new body frightens them into silence.

Your team—Dugan, Morita, Jones, Falsworth, Derneir, and of course, Bucky—is something new.  You’ve never had a team before that was not you and Bucky against the rest of the world, you have never had a campfire camaraderie like this one, all of you singing lewd songs in a rousing chorus while passing a cup of frankly terrible coffee around the fire.  Any of these men would die for you.  You’re not certain what to do with this, but it seems important that you have it, equally important that you ensure none of them are ever put in a position where they should have to act on it.  They are not yours the way Bucky is yours.  You will never find any of them again after they die.

Nevertheless, you all fight _well_ together.  There is a comfort in a battle-family, a comfort that you have never indulged in before, never known you could have.  They love you with their bitter hearts open, and each one is dangerous in his own violent way.  Cutlass quick or bombshell bright, they fight with their hearts on their sleeves, and you have never been more grateful for it in your entire life.

 

* * *

 

There is a danger in the thought, but you have never been good at controlling your thoughts, so when the hope rises up in your throat, you cannot force it back down.  In the dark of the forest, Bucky’s head pillowed by your thigh, moonlight splattered over his sleeping face like watercolor paints, you allow yourself to hope that you get to keep him this time.  _Please, dear god, let me keep him.  Let us outlive this war, just this once._

 

* * *

 

You ought to have known you would lose him to the frozen grasp of winter’s last breath.  The train is a revenge mission of sorts, though you’re certain not to frame it that way to your superiors when you suggest the mission.  You would not be so adamant about capturing Zola if he did not harm Bucky so harshly, so intimately.  (That darkness still lurks in the back of every one of Bucky’s laughs, the hollow downward spiral that you can see in his eyes.)  It is for revenge, so there is no way for you to think on it rationally, no way for you to be objective when you cannot stop dreaming about crushing Zola’s oddly-shaped head between your hands.

If it were not a revenge mission, you might’ve had your head more firmly on your shoulders.  If it were not a revenge mission, you would not have been so reckless, would not have allowed him to take on such a large foe alone—

But it is a revenge mission, and Bucky does fight the large HYDRA agent with grim resignation on his face, he does it with your shield at his side, and he falls off the side of the train with your name, your name in his mouth.

“Take my hand!” you wail, reaching for him, reaching for the future you have never once gotten to have.  If you could just get a hand around his wrist, you could pull him up into the train car, you could cradle his face between your strange, large palms and kiss the disbelief off his face until you were both breathless and gasping.  If you could just grab his hand, if your body could stop disappointing you when you need it most—

He’s screaming when he falls, but it is not your name that is carried up to you on the icy wind.  It is a wordless cry, cutting through the snow.

You are the one who makes an animal sound of loss as your arm stretches towards him even still.

 

* * *

 

There are cracks in the windshield of the HYDRA plane you’re flying into the ground, enough so you can hear the whistling of the wind that whips your hair back from your face, making your eyes water as you careen toward the surface of the ocean beneath you.  Peggy Carter’s voice is crackling at you over the radio, and you are reminded of Billy Holliday, the evenings spent with Bucky swaying around the living room in his sock feet and shirt sleeves.  It’s a good memory, warm and sweet and only ever so slightly sad.

She’s telling you that you don’t have to do this, but you’re shaking your head, blood from your split lip dripping down your chin.  You wipe it away with the back of your hand, head still shaking _no_ over and over again.  She doesn’t understand.  None of them understand.

Even when you had nothing—no family, no friends, no purpose—you had Bucky.  You had the promise of Bucky always in front of you, every footprint, every road leading to him and his wide, open arms.  You have tracked him like an animal through more lives than you have deserved to live.  You have followed him into fire and snow and you will follow him into the dirt if you can.

“You don’t have to do this,” she tells you again, desperation coloring her static-crackle voice.

You don’t answer her, not this time, but you close your eyes as you brace for impact.  Your hands are clenched tight around the plane’s controls, white-knuckled fists that could crush bone if you try hard enough.  Red warning light flashing next to your head, wind slicing at your unguarded throat, you open your mouth to tell Peggy you’re grateful for what she’s done for you—

But then you are going under, icy water flooding your lungs, and your last thought is _it wasn’t worth it._

 

* * *

 

 Summer

_present day: 2014_

 

* * *

 

When he rips off his mask, long, dark snarls of hair tangled as they fall into his face, you think, for a moment, that you could not possibly be as gutted as you are.  But there you stand, clutching your stomach, his black-smudged venomous eyes the only thing in the world yet created that can bring you to your knees.  You fall, like he fell, the sun beating down on the back of your neck, burning into you all the way to your core.  You will choke if you are not careful.  You will choke on your shame.

 

* * *

 

When you wake in the twenty-first century, you’re half convinced that you will claw your way out of SHIELD’s constricting embrace with your fingers and teeth.  Shoving out onto the street, spinning in the center of Times Square, circling until you are dizzy, until you can feel the sweat drip down your back—you suppose it isn’t much different than the animal snarl that is just barely pressed behind the backs of your teeth where it belongs.  Wherever this is that you are, it is not New York, and you refuse, for months, to call it by its proper name.  This is not New York.  Bucky, hair slick, lipstick smudged over the collar of his best button-up shirt, that is New York.  Your small hands and his snorting laughter, that is New York.  The bright, flashing lights and deafening sound is an assault, not a city.

“What the fuck did you do to me,” you demand, clutching at your neck for your dog tags so you can hang onto something familiar while the man in the eye patch approaches you with less caution, you think, than is in his best interest.

“You’ve been asleep, Captain,” he tells you, attempting to be placating, hands held out to you, palms up, in supplication.  His one eye is piercing when it catches your gaze.  “For a long time.  You’ve been asleep for seventy years.”

“Bullshit,” you hiss, but the world around you cannot lie, New York cannot lie, and even after seventy years of death, you can recognize the pulse-beat of this place beneath the balls of your feet.  _Oh, god,_ you think, and scrape a hand through your hair so you don’t gouge it into your own heart instead.  _Oh, god, there’s no Bucky here to be found._

That thought, and the accompanying wave of nausea that follows, makes you blink back the fog that suddenly creeps in at the corner of your vision, fighting the urge to just crumple in the middle of the street and collapse under the weight of this city which is not yours, not really.  Director Fury, eye full of pity, extends a hand.  You do not take it, but you let him open a car door for you, and you can only assume that this means you’ve given up.

 _It wasn’t worth it_ , you think again, looking at your hands clenched in your lap instead of the window.  Director Fury attempts small talk twice before he’s convinced that you are not in a responding mood, and then he is silent.  You do not want to know the history that has passed you by in a rush of howling wind.  You do not want to know the science behind how they woke you from your arctic death.  All you want to do is look at your hands, look at how empty they are, and tip your head back against the head rest of your seat when you can look at them no longer.

 

* * *

 

You aren’t dead.  This much you ascertain over the first months spent in the belly of the beast Fury calls SHIELD, with all the blood tests and physical exams and flurry of doctors who want to discover how it is that your heart is still beating.  You submit to all the tests, nonplussed, resignation making your limbs heavy.  This bright, flashy world is without Bucky, so what does it matter that you’re alive?  You’ve been through worse than the cold water and ice—the flash flood agony of bullet wounds, toxic gas, bleeding out time and time again—and come out the other side a new man every time.  It does not surprise you much that you are here, now, body still foreign, eyes still aching.  It only surprises you that you did not have to die in between.

And if you didn’t die, then there is no way that Bucky could have been reborn anew; there was no closure, no closing parenthesis.  While you linger on, a relic of a century past, then Bucky must wait in limbo, waiting for you to wither away, waiting for the last of the dying light to flicker into smoke.  From ashes will he be reborn, but you must make the ashes in the first place.  Until you burn, until this new world burns you away, you will be held in suspended animation, your life stretched out too long.

You stretch your hands out, but you can’t brush your fingers against your death, not this time.

 

* * *

 

If this life is a fever dream, then you cannot sweat it out.  You fight who they tell you to fight, you team up with the people they point you at, but you’re only going through the motions, really.  You’re almost tempted to end the waiting yourself—you could do it, you’ve died enough by now that you know your breaking points, you know how far you would have to push yourself to die, and it is not be as far as the scientists have hypothesized—but you think about Bucky’s hands framing your face when you were small and you force yourself to step away from the ledge in your head. 

 _How many goddamn times do I have to tell you not to get yourself killed?_ Bucky asked you, back when you had hope that you could keep on this way without difficulty.  Die, live, die again; death will find you soon enough, it always has in the past, and besides, you’re not certain you could look Bucky in the eye if you killed yourself to find him again.

There are people here, men and women and children that are relying on you to put on the damn costume and be the hero they mistake you for.  So you pull on the mask, though you do not trust it, you shoulder your shield and do not question the orders you’re given.

You still jump out of every plane without a parachute.

 

* * *

 

Natasha—if that is truly her name—oozes a placidity that you distrust with every cell of your body.  She is fluid, and she frightens you, in the deep, dark, animal place beneath your sternum.  She is very good at her job.  She is also, you suppose, your friend, though you aren’t particularly sure when that happened.  You aren’t good at this, and you tell her as much, but she only shrugs with that same fluidity that means she could be anybody, anywhere, any time.  She is water in a snake skin, but you keep that observation to herself.

“According to the history books, you’ve had six friends in your entire life,” she says, flexing her wrist that is sore from where she twisted it while the both of you were sparring.  She’s still circling around you on the training mat, and you counter as best you can, sweat beading up between your shoulder blades, making your shirt stick to your back.  “I wasn’t expecting you to be excellent at something you haven’t practiced.”

You lunge at her, hoping to catch her by surprise, but she moves out of the way easily and you end up flat on your stomach.

“Thanks,” you tell the training mat.

“Anytime,” Natasha answers, and reaches down to pat the top of your head.

 

* * *

 

Natasha is nothing like Bucky.  Where he was raucous and loud, she is silent and assessing—the dry sarcasm that comes out of her mouth surprises you every time, and it delights you, startles laughter out of your chest, which makes her smile like she knows something you don’t and quirk her penciled eyebrow.  There is something in you that she compliments, some part of you that she echoes effortlessly—you’re never sure if it’s really her that’s in there, never quite sure who it is you’re talking to, but she seems content enough, so who are you to judge her?  You aren’t quite yourself, either.  You haven’t been for centuries.

“Did you get into _Romanoff’s_ pants?” Tony Stark demands, half inside his metal suit, half of it clinging to his body like it doesn’t want to let go.  “The hundred-year-old virgin and _Romanoff?”_

You blanch, recoiling.  “Not even a little bit,” you promise quickly, hands at shoulder-height in a gesture of surrender.  “Where the hell did you get that idea?”

“I said your name and she _smiled_ ,” Tony says, the accusation in his voice hilariously nonthreatening.  “I am _offended,_ I am _personally offended_ —”

You roll your eyes.  “Oh, do me a favor and shut up, will you?” you ask, and catch a piece of armor that falls off his shoulder.  “I didn’t sleep with Nat.  Maybe you’re not familiar with the way friends work, which, well, I wouldn’t be surprised, per se—”

“Rude,” Tony interjects, hands on his hips.

“—But c’mon, Tony, I don’t really think she’s into that.  And it wouldn’t be any of your business if she was.  Or if we did.”  You tilt your chin up ever so slightly when you finish, even though you’re taller than Tony is, even though the challenge isn’t something you need to show off anymore.  (Your body still feels small, your shoulders still feel like they could curl in on themselves if you let them, turn concave until you disappear entirely.  You find that you have to keep reminding yourself that you will not turn two dimensional if you stop paying attention to your body.)

Tony looks at you, as he frequently does, as though you are the stupidest person he has ever met in his life.  “Nat hates everybody who isn’t Barton or a fluffy cat,” he says flatly, eyes narrowed at you.

“And you hate everybody who has fewer than three PhDs, but look at you, attempting to hold a conversation with me,” you say, grinning, and shoulder check him as you get up to pass him, making him squawk when he’s lands against the nearest wall. 

“Liberty and justice my _ass_ ,” you hear him mutter to himself, wounded, as you walk away from him.  You catch yourself smiling to yourself, your fingertips raised to your lips in pleasant surprise.

 

* * *

 

You have your own apartment, and you try to make it feel like home.  You do not live in Brooklyn on purpose, you put yourself up in DC, and you tell yourself it’s because you want to be near to SHIELD headquarters, but the fact remains that you do not want to see any of New York while you do not have Bucky with you.  You are having to learn how to make a life that does not revolve around a war, you missed your opportunity to die in WWII, so you have to wait for the next great war to shake your country to its roots.

Until then, you will live in DC, and you will buy a record player so you can listen to Billie Holiday with your eyes closed, imagining the ghost of Bucky Barnes swaying artlessly around your living room with his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows.  His suspenders falling off his shoulders, whiskey on his breath when he giggles.

You fold your hands on top of your stomach and focus on every exhalation, keeping them even so the hitching in your breath does not escalate.

 

* * *

 

Sam Wilson, when he asks you what makes you happy, takes you completely by surprise.  You’d never given it much thought.  You are getting by, in this new world that you are doing your damnedest to claim for your own, but you have difficulty thinking of yourself in the present tense. 

“I don’t know,” you tell him, smiling slightly, shrugging a shoulder.  Sam reshuffles his papers without a touch of pity on his face, nodding like the words make any degree of sense.  Bucky would have looked at you dubiously, then, would have smacked the back of your head and told you _well, figure it out, genius._   This makes you smile somewhat helplessly, but Sam accepts this as well, suggesting you come run with him in the mornings.

“Just as long as you try not to lap me _every_ time,” he adds, grinning, and what can you do but grin back?

 

* * *

 

You fill your days with activity to keep yourself from quietly going insane.  You keep a list of all the things your friends think you need to experience to truly be a 21st century man, and you methodically make your way through the list, crossing things off in your little black book.  It’s easiest not to think about Bucky when you’re in action, so you take every mission SHIELD assigns you, you spend a lot of time on Sam’s couch, you bug Tony enough that he gets you your own passcode to his lab out of exasperation, and you try (and fail) several times to befriend Natasha’s cat.

It isn’t a terrible life, frankly.  You’ve done worse for yourself.  There is a void under your sternum that no amount of action can fill, but that’s alright, you’ve lived with worse wounds for longer.  Sam seems to be under the impression that the war does this to most people—gives them voids in their chests that nothing can fill—and you know firsthand what the ever-changing riptide can do to a person’s soul.  Perhaps there are other people like you out there, chasing each other’s tails in endless circles, but that thought makes you feel small and far away, so you do your best not to dwell.  Sam tells you that there are names now for this sort of thing, that shell-shock is now called PTSD and someday you might be able to look down at your hands and see something that isn’t red.  You are doubtful.  There is an awful lot of red.

Nevertheless, PTSD or shell-shock, depression or shame, you are finding a rhythm in your life for which you are so very grateful.  There are people here, people who can watch your back when you do not have the wherewithal to watch your own.  There are people here, strange, bruised, wonderful people who can hold you back when you cannot hold yourself in stasis.  You have a rhythm now.  You still think about him every day, you still see his reflection in every window you pass, but as you squint into the morning sunlight, you think that you might have found something here, something that you wouldn’t have looked for if Bucky had been within your sights.

With your hands on your hips, head tipped back to feel the sun on your face, you allow yourself to think that you might be getting the hang of this thing, this living thing.  You have a rhythm now, one that you can follow, one that it does not hurt you to endure.  And perhaps that is the most important of all—you are no longer _enduring_ your life, you are living it.

If only Bucky could see you now.

 

* * *

 

The man with the metal arm has eyes that strike you cold in your tracks, despite the heat that coils around your throat in a fever-grasp.  You have seen those eyes before, you have seen the waning shadows before, you have seen the eclipse in his heavy gaze.  Howling static erupts in your ears, your shield nearly falls from your suddenly lax fingers, all you can see is the curve of his mouth as he bares his teeth into a snarl.

“Oh, god, no,” you breathe, and you know now why you are alive, how you survived being filled to the brim with ice.  He is here, he has been here in the shadows this entire time, he never died, and you, oh, you, with your small, fearful heart—you never die first.  You will never die first.  “Bucky—”

“Who the hell is Bucky?” he spits, and you feel, for perhaps the first time in your life, that you have nothing to say to him, nothing that he would understand.  He is a stranger to you.  He has never once been a stranger to you before in your life.

You are shoved to your knees and he disappears into the air again, he flickers out of view when you turn your head the wrong way.  He is the mirage that you always knew him to be, metal arm glinting in the summer sunlight, casting strange refractions of light on every object that he passes.  Your knees hit the concrete and you can’t tell if it’s the sun or your gushing heart that makes your skin burn, but it doesn’t matter now, because you are burning, oh, lord, you’re on fire, won’t anyone put you out—

 

* * *

 

“This isn’t the kind of guy you save,” Sam tells you carefully, each word designed specially to keep you from bolting and going off on your own.  He and Natasha are operating under the same premise, you can see it, you are watching them try not to spook you and it would drive you more insane if you did not know them to be right. “This is the kind of guy you stop.”

You look out off the edge of the bridge, you inhale deeply, and you know that he is wrong.  Bucky has forgotten you so many times.  You think, near the end of the last time you knew him, that he might have begun to remember; but he has forgotten you so many times, and he has loved you nonetheless, and you have faith that he can do so again.  You will walk to him and you will hold out your arms, you will tell him that he may not be Bucky, but you are Steve, you have always been his Steve.  You will hand him the knife, handle-first.  You will let him make the decision.  You have been fighting to find a reason to live since the first moment you awoke in this strange land, tongue dry in your mouth.  He will come with you and join you in the family that you created from scratch or he will kill the both of you, there is no in between—it is his choice, and he will make it, and you will love him for it no matter which he chooses.

“He doesn’t know you,” Sam says, brow creased in concern.

“He will,” you say, with confidence, and smile, ever so slightly.

 

* * *

 

Natasha seems surprised that you aren’t more shaken by the fact that HYDRA is back, up and running and causing mayhem, but if you and Bucky are both alive, then the war is not over.  You and he were created to fight, made to battle your way through every war until you are cut down again.  If you and Bucky are alive, then the war wages on, and HYDRA does not concern you the way it concerns you to know that someone out there is dealing out immortality in blows, and seems to do so with no remorse. 

This life that you’ve created—you are proud, you are fiercely protective over what you have created.  It may not be perfect, but it is _yours_ , it is every starburst bloom of warmth in your stomach, it is every breath you take that does not feel like it will slice you on the inhalation.  You do not want it to be taken away.  You believe you would fight for it, if the circumstances were normal.  But now they’ve pitted Bucky against you, they have found the one person you will not fight, and they put a gun in his hands.  They push him at you, and you hold your arms open, you do not close your eyes for a moment.

 _Let me look at him_ , you plead, praying to whoever is listening.  _Let his face be the last thing I see._

 

* * *

 

“I won’t fight you,” you tell him, exhausted beyond measure, and you drop your shield.  It falls through the bottom of the helicarrier you’re on, down into the water.  Let it drown the way you drowned, let it sink to the bottom of the Potomac.  You do not need a barrier between you and Bucky, not now, not ever.  You have held his dying body in your arms too many times to stand for distance, even when he is razor-sharp and every word he speaks is another scrap of shrapnel hurtling toward your body.  It is a good hurt.  You don’t mind.  “I won’t fight you,” you say again, your voice rough and aching.  “You’re my friend.”

When he attacks you, screaming—“You’re my _mission!_ ”—you accept it with open arms, you are pliant as you fall to the floor.  You have fought so hard in the past two years to keep breathing, to keep waiting for a time in which you can find this beautiful, agonizing, animal man that is now trying to tear you apart with his bare hands.  You have fought so hard.  You have used up whatever strength you had in reserve, every inch of heart left in your chest.  He is holding you, and he is hurting you, and as your head snaps back with an uppercut punch, you think _yes, yes, hurt me, Bucky, hurt me for what I’ve done to you, for calling you time and time again into the war, chasing you into the paths of bullets—_

“You’re my mission,” he hisses, fingers tightening around the throat of your costume.

“Then finish it,” you choke out, but he doesn’t finish it, gravity does, and as you hurtle toward the water for the second time in a century, you reach up toward him and think, with the frenzied mind of the damned, that he is reaching for you as well.

 

* * *

 

Sam tells you who fished you out of the Potomac again, and you don’t believe him, you don’t, but you want to.  You can’t remember wanting something more in your entire life.  If Bucky dragged you out of the water, then he knows something about who you are—how much does he remember?  How much will he get back?  You remember his lost face in the belly of the HYDRA compound, mumbling about trenches, and you clutch at your chest, hoping. 

You find, when you rub at your sternum, that your dog tags are no longer around your neck.  For a moment it doesn’t register, but you’ve worn that chain—or one similar—for a very long time, and its absence is obvious and noticeable.  You try to ask Sam about it, but Sam just shrugs, perturbed.  Your fingertips press a little harder against your collar bone, and you get a strange little feeling at the back of your neck, like your center of gravity has shifted ever so slightly to the left.

 

* * *

  

Your first instinct, as can be expected, is to race after his disappearing shadow.  It’s always worked for you before, after all, but Natasha all but shoves you down into your hospital bed and smacks your hand away from the tape at the crease of your elbow when you try to rip away the IV drip. 

“Stop that,” she says, annoyed.  You try to go for the tape again, but she smacks you again, this time harder, and you don’t particularly want to know how hard she’ll hit you if you try for a third time.  “You are _compromised._   Lay the fuck down and let yourself heal, Rogers.”

“Seconded,” Sam pipes up from the chair next to your bedside, offering you a shrug when you shoot him a wounded look.  He goes back to his magazine when Natasha sits at the foot of your bed, and you huff somewhat indignantly, though the concern in their eyes melts your anger into something duller.  Impatience, maybe.

“He’s out there,” you point out, not for the first time.  Natasha looks at you, eyes narrowed, and you do your best to hold her gaze, though you are uncomfortable under her scrutiny.  Sam, the bastard, doesn’t step in to help you at all, seems to be consumed entirely by his magazine.  Then again, Natasha has a certain way of convincing people she means them a great deal of bodily harm without doing more than looking at them, so Steve supposes Sam’s complicit nature in your captivity can be easily explained.  “Nat, he’s alone, and he’s hurting, and he remembers me a little—”

“He’s alone, and he’s hurting, and that makes him dangerous,” Nat says evenly, one hand resting over your nearest ankle.  “Trust me on this one, Steve.  As someone who’s had their head messed with—”  She pauses momentarily, and sighs a brief breath through her teeth.  “Just.  You’re going to search for him no matter what I say to you.  But you I think it might be a better idea this time for you to let him come to you rather than the other way around.”

You clench your jaw.  If you do not look for him, you will not find him.  He does not know the scent of your heart, he does not know how to track someone based on the taste of their smile alone—he will not find you, he will not come to you.  You can wait, but if you wait much longer than you have already, then by the time you put your ear to the ground, his trail will be cold.  The choice is not between ‘find him’ or ‘wait for him’, the choice is between ‘move now’ or ‘forever hold your peace’.

“I can’t do that,” you tell her, and you might have regretted it—Natasha’s face is the sort of solemn that means she is committing homicide in her head—if you did not have his hollow, haunted eyes hovering at the edge of your vision always.  “He needs me.”

She huffs a breath, standing from your bedside.  “Does he?” she asks you, one eyebrow raised.  “Or do you need him?”

 

* * *

 

The moment you are released from the hospital, you tug on your street clothes again, letting Sam help you pack up your tattered costume into his VA tote bag.  “Handy,” you remark only somewhat sarcastically, and he shoves you a little bit down the hallway, muttering to himself about not harming the invalid.

You run into Tony on the way out, him looking like he either came off of one or two hours of sleep or a really bad hangover, dark glasses on and a bunch of gaudy flowers in the crook of one arm.

“Damn, are you being released already?” he asks, tipping his glasses down his nose so he can look at you better.  His eyes are bloodshot.  “I mean, yay, you’re being released, congrats on not dying.  Hooray for America.  I was just hoping I could weep by your bedside a little like a crappy WWII movie.”  He thrusts the flowers into your arms.  “Here.  Courtesy of Pep.  She wants me to invite you over for dinner, but you should do the diplomatic thing and say no because she really can’t cook, she’s a lovely woman, probably my second favorite person only to JARVIS, but there’re some things you just shouldn’t subject yourself to on purpose.”

You blink when he pauses for breath.  “Come here,” you tell him, grabbing one of his biceps, and drag him back out the door again.  You hand the flowers unceremoniously to Sam, who is extremely unimpressed.  “Tell Nat I’m taking her advice,” you instruct him as you steer Tony toward the only car that could potentially be his—it’s flashy, red, and has a license plate that reads “IRNMAIDN”.  “Stark is going to help me locate him, and then I’m going to sit back and wait.”

“So, you aren’t taking her advice at all,” Sam clarifies, catching the keys to your motorcycle that you toss at him, along with your helmet.  His arms are now full, so he can’t reach out and stop you. 

“Basically,” you say, unapologetic, and shove Tony in the passenger’s side of the car, ignoring the steady stream of indignant protests that come from him, as well as the _where are we going what are we doing why do you think I’ll help you and why on earth do you think you’re allowed to drive—_

 

* * *

 

Tony is and always will be a pain in the ass, but he’s a genius, too, which makes up for it, at least according to him.  He writes up a facial recognition program—“Slapped it together, really,” he informs you breezily, but the manic spark in his bloodshot eyes says differently—and makes JARVIS help him evaluate the matches to see if you can catch a glimpse of the pair of lightning eyes and metal arm that hangs heavily at his left side.  You are lucky that he has such easily spotted defining characteristics.  There isn’t much one can do to completely disguise a metal limb.

“That’s him,” you say, with conviction, on the third day of searching.  Tony’s hair has grown wilder and wilder the longer the both of you have sat here because Tony can’t stop scraping his fingers through it, making it stick up at odd angles in the back and completely flat in the front.  “That’s him, I’d know him anywhere.”  You look down at the pictures of his face, your fingertips hovering just barely over his image.  You can feel Tony’s gaze on you, but you don’t particularly know what to make of it.

“Who is he, though? Really?” Tony wants to know, chewing on the end of a pen.  “Like, okay, Winter Soldier, Nat’s infodump, yadda yadda yadda.  Who was he really?”

You are leaning over his computer desk (a desk made out of one enormous computer screen, that is), arms braced on the edge of the glass.  “He’s my family,” you answer without hesitation, and you think across the chasm to him, to where he’s lying in his shitty motel bed with one arm curled under his pillow, a hand, you hypothesize, wrapped around the handle of a knife— _come on, Bucky, come join this weird little family I’ve made, there is room for you, Bucky, there is space here for you if you would like to fill it._

 

* * *

 

Tony keeps tabs on Bucky at your behest, but he doesn’t interfere.  You spend some more time on Sam’s couch.  He buys you bad takeout and marathons Star Trek with you, keeping your mind off the ghost that is somewhere in this city, running his metal fingertips over the walls of the buildings that he passes.  Every time you step out into the city, you inhale and you think you can sense him, you think you can feel his heartbeat when you press your feet hard into the concrete beneath you.  It is difficult, living without him when you know he is within arm’s reach.  It is difficult, but Tony keeps sending you updated pictures, and you can feast your eyes at least to your heart’s content.

He looks wiry.  A little malnourished.  Determined, too, with his mismatched hands shoved in his jacket pockets wherever he goes, a baseball cap stuffed low on his head to hide from the watching eyes of the city itself.  You let the pad of your thumb drag over his face, the concave curve of his shoulders as he walks.  You lie in bed and you look at these pictures of him, and you are aching, but it is a _good_ ache, the kind that means you have stretched just a little too far.  He always looks frightened, in the pictures, but it’s of something that you cannot identify.  Himself, maybe.  You wouldn’t be particularly surprised.

“Are you sure he’s going to show up?” you ask Natasha impatiently over the phone.  She’s in Liberia looking for Clint, who dropped off the radar a little before SHIELD collapsed in on itself.

“No,” she answers.  You can hear a crinkling in the background that sounds suspiciously like a bag of pretzels.  “But he might.  Stray cat theory.”

“I thought you were supposed to put out something familiar on your front porch when you’re trying to coax a lost pet home,” you say dubiously.

“What d’you think you are?” is all Nat says, amused, and you hang up a little disgruntled, a little inordinately pleased.

 

* * *

 

 

You wait with as much patience as you can hold in your wide, warm palms that are a little less foreign to you these days.  That is not, in fact, altogether too much patience, but you try, dear God, do you try.  You press your face against the window in your bedroom, the glass cooling your cheek, and imagine him out there in the city, lost, working at getting himself less lost.  You are, in many ways, doing the same thing, though you can remember yourself from the very first time you fired a musket, so perhaps you have it a great deal better than he does.  But your fingertips scrape over the glass no matter if you’re lucky or cursed, and you wait, you wait for the sunlight to hit him and illuminate the darker corners of his mind.

There’s no war for you to fight, not anymore.  The only thing left is you, him, and the echoes of all your past lives, sitting there in the void between your ribs, waiting to be discovered.

 

* * *

  

You answer the door expecting Sam.  He was working at the VA—“Needing a break from your shit, Rogers, so I’m going to go deal with a bunch of other vets,” he told you, eyes warm and crinkling at the corners—but he said he’d be home around this time, so you open the door expecting his grin and probably a stupid pun.  What you get, instead, is someone who is ragged at the edges, baseball cap for a team he doesn’t root for pushed back on his head, tangled locks of hair brushing over the collar of a leather jacket two sizes too big for him.

“Hey,” Bucky says, eyes tired.  You don’t miss the way he glances briefly over his shoulder before his gaze flickers back to you, and you only wait a beat longer—mouth hanging open—before you open the door the rest of the way and offer him a clear path into the apartment.  He hesitates, but he walks inside, clutching something that you suspect is a knife in his sleeve.

“Can I—” You clear your throat.  “Um.  Can I get you anything?”

Bucky’s shaking his head, but he’s wearing the face that says he’s trying not to be a bother, so you open the cupboard for a glass anyway, reaching into the fridge to retrieve some of what Sam calls Wilson’s Magical Orange Juice, which is really just Tropicana poured into an empty jam jar, but he swears it works miracles.  You could use a miracle right about now.

“I went to the Smithsonian,” Bucky says, after sipping a little at the orange juice.  “Studied up a little.  But it—uh.  It didn’t say anything about the trenches.”  He takes a long swig, then, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.  “Which I remember pretty vividly.”

“I do too,” you supply softly, your eyes caught on the glint of the chain around his neck, the shift and clink of your dog tags beneath his shirt.

“So I was thinking you could tell me about what happened with the two of us,” he continues, but the statement comes out like a question, almost _apologetically_ , like there is any chance in the world that you would say no to him.  You swallow down against the thickness of the back of your tongue, but there is something stuck in your throat that you can’t dislodge, something that sticks to the roof of your mouth like glue and renders your tongue useless.

“Yeah, Bucky, yeah, we can do that,” is what you say, but your voice is thick, your eyes are burning, you are so ashamed of the way you can’t tear your eyes from him, can’t look at him with anything but the gaze of a starving man.  “I was—I was going to.  To look for you.  But I thought I shouldn’t.  I’m so—I’m so bad at this, Buck, I’m so sorry.”  You couldn’t have kept the miserable wince out of your voice if you tried, but Bucky doesn’t seem to mind, he just clasps his hands a little tighter around his glass in his lap and looks back at you with equal hunger.

“I know,” he says, and takes an unsteady sort of breath, exhaling it through his teeth.  Then, with something twitching at the corners of his mouth that could be interpreted as the beginning of a smile, your dog tags standing out against his collar bones, he says the words that you have been looking for since you could speak, and it very nearly brings you to your knees: “I remember.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm barneswilson on tumblr! Come say hi :)


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